ges are condensed into the span of a few seconds. The
accidental jarring of a door, or any noise, will, at the same moment, it
awakens a person, suggest the incidents of an entire dream. Hence some
persons--Lord Brougham in particular--have supposed that all our dreams
take place in the transition or interval between sleep and waking. A
gentleman dreamt that he had enlisted as a soldier, joined his regiment,
deserted, was apprehended, carried back, tried, condemned to be shot,
and, at last, led out for execution. After all the usual preparations a
gun was fired; he awoke with the report, and found that a noise in an
adjoining room had, in the same moment, produced the dream and awakened
him. The same want of any notion of the duration of time occurs, more or
less, in all dreams; hence our ignorance when we awake of the length of
the night. A friend of Doctor Abercrombie's dreamt that he crossed the
Atlantic and spent a fortnight in America. In embarking, on his return,
he fell into the sea, and, awakening with the fright, discovered he had
not been ten minutes asleep. "I lately dreamed," says Dr. Macnish, "that
I made a voyage--remained some days in Calcutta--returned home--then
took ship for Egypt, where I visited the cataracts of the Nile, Grand
Cairo, and the Pyramids; and to crown the whole, had the honor of an
interview with Mehemet Ali, Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great." All
this was the work of a single hour, or even a few minutes. In one of the
dreams which Mr. De Quincey describes--when under the influence of
opium--"The sense of Space and in the end of Time were," he states,
"both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c., were exhibited in
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space
swelled, and was amplified to a sense of unutterable infinity. This,
however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of Time; I
sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or one hundred years in one
night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millenium, passed
in that time; or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any
human experience." One of the miracles of Mohammed appears to be
illustrative of the same phenomenon. We read, in the Koran, that the
angel Gabriel took Mohammed, one morning, out of his bed to give him a
sight of all things in the Seven Heavens and in Paradise; and, after
holding ninety thousand spiritual conferences, he was brought back again
to his be